Bookmarked: Staff Picks: The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary.

So begins one of the most famous poems by an American writer – The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.

Here are a few facts about this well-known and creepy rhyme.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 and died in 1849 at the age of forty. Though officially the cause of his death is unknown, historians have theorized that disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, or suicide are all likely causes.

Edgar Allan Poe is famous for Gothic fiction like The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death, and many other well-known works.

It is true that ravens can mimic human speech and some can perform even better than parrots. Poe even considered using an owl or a parrot as the subject for his poem.

Poe's poems like The Raven and Annabel Lee allude to lost love. In fact, Poe’s wife Virginia was suffering from tuberculous while he was writing The Raven. She passed away two years after its publication. (Speaking of Poe’s wife, young Virginia Clemm was only thirteen when she married her cousin, twenty-seven-year-old Edgar.)

Though Poe was one of the first American writers to make a career of writing, copyright laws at the time kept him near poverty. On January 29, 1894 The Raven first appeared in print in The New York Evening Mirror. Poe earned $9 for its publication but after that initial publication, periodicals across the United States reprinted the poem without compensating the author. Poe tried to capitalize on his success by teaching poetry writing techniques that he claimed to have used in creating The Raven, though the claim is widely disregarded.

Check out FCPL’s rendition of The Raven shot by staff members at the Sharon Forks Library in our virtual Halloween program, The Haunted Library.

Or read more of Poe’s works in these books.